This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, college readiness, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level.

Political
conventions are echo chambers designed to generate feelings of
invincibility, sending forth the party faithful with a spring in their
steps and hope in their hearts. Who would want to be a wet blanket at
such moveable feasts?

Steve Munisteri
would. Although he calls himself “the eternal optimist,” he respects
reality, which nowadays is not conducive to conservatives’ cheerfulness.
He served as chairman of the Texas Republican Party from 2010 to 2015
because he discerned “a seismic shift in demographics” that meant his
state could “turn Democratic sooner than most people thought.”

The
fact that Republicans have won every Texas statewide office since 1994 —
the longest such streak in the nation — gives them, he says, “a false
sense of security.” In 2000, Republican candidates at the top of the
ticket — in statewide races — averaged about 60 percent of the vote. By
2008, they averaged less than 53 percent.

And Republican down-ballot
winners averaged slightly over 51 percent.

Texas is not wide-open spaces filled with cattle and cotton fields. Actually, it is 84.7 percent urban, making it the 15th-most-urban
state. It has four of the nation’s 11 largest cities — Houston, San
Antonio, Dallas and Austin. Texas’s growth is in its cities, where
Republicans are doing worst.

Dallas has gone from solidly Republican to solidly Democratic. A recent poll
showed Harris County (Houston), which is about 69 percent minority,
with a majority identifying as Democrats. The San Antonio metropolitan
area is about three-quarters minority. Travis County (Austin, seat of
the state government, the flagship state university and a burgeoning
tech economy attracting young people) voted 60.1 percent for President Obama in 2012.

In
the 2014 gubernatorial election, Hispanics were 25 percent of Texas’s
registered voters but only 19 percent of turnout. Two years later,
Hispanics are 29 percent of registered voters. Now, suppose the person
at the top of a Republican national ticket gives Hispanics the
motivation to be, say, 25 percent of turnout. Although it is, Munisteri
says, “theoretically possible” for Texas Republicans to win by
increasing the white vote, this “political segregation” is, aside from
being morally repulsive, politically “a sure-fire long-term losing
proposition.”

The
“blue wall” — the 18 states and the District of Columbia that have
voted Democratic in at least six consecutive presidential elections —
today has 242 electoral votes. Texas, which is not a brick in this wall,
has 38 electoral votes. After the 2020 Census, it probably will have
40, perhaps 41. Were Texas to become another blue brick, the wall — even
if the 2020 Census subtracted a few electoral votes from the current
18 states — would have more than the 270 votes needed to elect a
president.

Since 1994, when it passed New York (which has now
sunk below Florida to fourth place), Texas has been the nation’s
second-most-populous state. Munisteri notes that it is the Republican
Party’s only large “anchor state.” The Democratic Party has two —
California and New York, with a combined 84 electoral votes. Or three,
if you count Illinois (20 electoral votes), which in the past four
presidential elections has voted Democratic by an average of slightly
more than 16 points.

Munisteri’s
conservative credentials are unassailable. He was a precociously
conservative teenager — a member of Young Americans for Freedom in high
school in 1976 — when Ronald Reagan was trying to wrest the Republican
nomination from President Gerald Ford. Munisteri, now working with the
Republican National Committee, became a Reagan volunteer and had an
exhilarating experience: Reagan, having lost eight of the first nine
primaries, revived his candidacy by winning all of Texas’s 100
convention delegates.

Munisteri’s politically formative years
were the conservative movement’s salad days — the late 1970s and the
1980s, when many conservatives acquired a serene certainty that this is
and always will be a center-right country. Munisteri, however, is “a
numbers guy,” so serenity is illusive.

He notes that beginning
with Franklin Roosevelt’s first victory in 1932, Democrats won seven of
nine presidential elections, and if they had succeeded in their effort
to enlist Dwight Eisenhower as a Democrat, they probably would have won
nine in a row. Trends can be reversed, but until they are, Republicans
risk protracted losing in a center-left country, which America now is,
and in a purple Texas, which soon could be.